Tag: classic

Candy Box 2

As foretold yesterday, today’s post is on the sequel to Candy Box, Candy Box 2.

The Map, where you travel to various locations. There’s a few secret areas to find here….
Those colored boxes are magic spells

It’s a much more developed game, with rather a lot of depth to it, but it’s still ultimately an incremental-style game in form, even if its not as direct about it as most of that benighted genre tend to be. There’s many more places to go and items to find than the first game, and a lot more secrets. If you don’t use the wiki, you’ll probably get stuck and have to search around for a few days until you find (or save up) the means to continue.

This monkey has an item you really want, if you can figure out a way to defeat him

While figuring out all the various ways to overcome the game’s puzzles is fun, I find the most interesting thing about Candy Box 2 to be its engine, which is surprisingly flexible for a game presented entirely with text characters, which is kind of like a deluxe Javascript version of the venerable Unix library curses. There’s windowing, a Z-order so objects can pass in front of others, and colors are used for magic effects, and some areas even have special effects, like scrolling around, zooming in on the action, or being able to swim up and down.

The highlight in this one is the puzzle the Cyclops at the lighthouse can eventually be persuaded to let you try, which as far as I can tell is of a completely novel type, and could be the subject of its own entire game. Good luck with that, by the way.

Like the first game, there was a preposterous Metafilter thread about Candy Box 2, and it’s even more full of spoilers, and equally as bizarre if taken out of context. Please enjoy responsibly.

Candy Box 2’s New Home (github.io)

Remember EYEZMAZE and GROW?

There was a time when these short Flash games were the toast of the internet. There is very little cultural memory online for anything that isn’t absolutely huge (and almost no quality control over the things that become huge) so no one talks about GROW anymore, or its Japanese creator On, which is a tremendous shame.

EYEZMAZE took a tremendous blow when Flash shut down. I really hate how people generally accepted its demise as good and necessary when it obliterated so many great things, like Homestar Runner’s original website, that are only now sort of becoming available again. There were serious problems with Flash, it’s true, but not all the reasons it was shoved out the airlock were good ones. Fortunately On has converted many of his games to work with HTML5.

The art is great for its own sake, but the games, available by clicking on the icons at the top of the site, are the highlights, and foremost of those are the GROW series. I was going to link them individually here, but most of them are GROW in some form of other. You should probably start with the first.

The object is to figure out the best order to click on the various items to add to the GROW planet. Every time you add something, things that were already on the planet may “level up” depending on the other things that are with it there. Some things being added too early may harm the development of other things. Usually there’s one specific order that will result in a perfect score (and an animation that goes with it). Figuring it out, using the visual clues from your failed attempts, will usually take many tries, but a run through only takes a couple of minutes at most. All off the GROW games take this general form, although most of them aren’t as complex as the first.

Bitrot has not been kind to GROW. There was an Android version of Grow RPG that appears to have succumbed to Google’s awful app culling policy, where if something isn’t updated, for whatever reason, in a certain time they just delete it. (Not nearly enough has been said about his hostile this is to software preservation. It’s horrendous.)

On has had health struggles over the years, which have interfered with his creation of new amusements. He still seems to be up and active though, and we hope he continues creating both his games and his art for a while to come.

EYEZMAZE (some games may require Ruffle)

On’s Twitter feed

On’s Bilibili page (Bilibili is a Chinese video site)